


Mutual Affinities of Organic Beings

by theradiointukyshead



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV)
Genre: AOS Brotp Week, Canon Compliant up to 4x15, F/M, Gen, background fitzsimmons
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-02-21
Updated: 2017-02-21
Packaged: 2018-09-26 01:27:05
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,251
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9855920
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/theradiointukyshead/pseuds/theradiointukyshead
Summary: The evolution of a friendship, from a beat-up couch in the Playground to a 7-Eleven in Singapore (or: Nostomania - intense homesickness; an irresistible compulsion to return home).





	

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nightlocktime](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nightlocktime/gifts).



> written for an obscure word prompt sent by my pal nightlocktime many, many moons ago.

i.

The stranger is on the couch again, her feet propped on the coffee table. She’s leafing through a trashy magazine, and only notices him when he trips over his own feet trying to leave the room. His tea sloshes, uncomfortably hot on his wrinkled shirt. He reaches his bad hand up to smooth it out.

“Can’t get away from me fast enough, huh?”

There’s mirth in her voice, but also a bit of hurt. His ears burn. He motions to the Xbox, bounces on his heels as if to shake loose the nervousness. “I – uh – I was gonna play, but thought it might – uh – disturb you.”

She tosses the magazine aside and looks at him, a softening, unfurling sort of curiosity. “You’ll have to be Player Two,” she says, resolute. Turns on the console, hands him the spare controller. And that’s that.

 

ii.

The stranger doesn’t come into his life by sneaking up on him. Rather, she barrels into him, and it’s a blinding flash of sunlight hair and sunlight smile, her presence suffusing like crisp summer. Two in the morning and she drags him, half asleep on a workbench, out of the garage and into bed. Three in the afternoon and they are on the floor in the common area, hunched over a game of Operation, his left hand tracing the motions until the buzzer no longer buzzes. The stranger becomes Agent Morse becomes Bobbi, which becomes Barbara when he’s in a particularly playful mood. He’s still Fitz to her though, the syllable somehow familiar and easy on the tip of her tongue.

One evening she pokes him with the corner of a folder. “Says here you never passed your field assessment. Something about abysmal hand-to-hand combat.”

That is how he finds himself being thrown repeatedly onto the padded floor.

“Again,” he demands, but the effect is somewhat lackluster with his face squished between her forearm and the sweaty training mat.

She backs off, extends a hand toward him. He takes it and clambers to his feet. He holds her gaze. “You were holding back on me. Don’t.”

So she doesn’t. It wouldn’t be the only time she hurts him.

Then comes the real S.H.I.E.L.D. Then comes strange faces crawling all over the base, some new, some old, but they might as well be new. She’s standing in front of him and he can’t see past the betrayal that clouds the space between them. A childhood wound begins to ache, somewhere deep in his marrow. This time, at least, he gets to be the one who walks away.

“We’re not the only ones after Coulson’s toolbox.” She pats his shoulder. “Be careful out there, Fitz.”

For a brief second he melts into her touch, seeking the reprieve from reality it offers. In the end, though, he shrugs her hand off. “Goodbye, Agent Morse.”

 

iii.

The next time he’s alone with her, she’s in a hospital bed, tangled in a million tubes, bruises red and raging on her skin. His anger suddenly dissipated, he sinks into the seat next to her. They exchange a smile that is two parts water.

“I lost half a lung,” she begins, already out of breath. “I laid there in my own blood, wheezing, and I thought of you.”

The fluorescent light hums quietly. He brushes a thumb across the back of her hand. “We’ll all learn to breathe again eventually.”

“You did. But what if I won’t?”

“Hey,” he says, and thinks of something golden, something light, “I had a little help, didn’t I?”

 

iv.

She’s on crutches and he’s on his last legs chasing another dead end. He catches a red-eye back from Yucatan, arriving at the base just before dawn. In the gym, she is doing simple stretches before her morning PT session. He knows to go to her before she even asks.

His duffle bag hits the floor with a dull thud, and then he’s crying, gracelessly, the kind of crying that’s more half-choked sobs than tears. Every fiber of his being needs Jemma back, but every fiber of his being is _tired_ and lost and he just wants to stop existing awhile. The process of getting through time is agony.

Rubber-clad metal thumps against the floor. Bobbi limps toward him and leans on her crutches, shifting her weight away from her bad leg. She doesn’t say anything; she just stands there beside him while he clutches his heart and bones and other things that break.

Minutes – or maybe hours – pass before he looks up to meet her eyes.

“I asked Coulson for a transfer,” she tells him. “Starting next week, I’ll be working in the lab.”

And it sounds so much like moving on that for a moment he selfishly resents her for it. But then she bends down to adjust her knee brace with a grunt, her crutches awkwardly in the way, and it occurs to him that they’re both stuck in the same hole, trying to claw their way out to find their purpose again.

It’s easier when they do it together.

He wipes away the last of his tears. “We have some time before your PT. Want to go to the lab and help me set up your new work station?”

He hears the clank of metallic crutches as they fall, and before he knows it her arms are around him, a hand stroking his back in slow, circular motions. She feels like the view outside his childhood window, he thinks idly, steadying her so that they lean onto each other.

“We’ll find her, okay?” she murmurs against his hair, voice a subdued kind of glow. “We’ll find her.”

 

v.

February is meant for restless sleepers. Especially those cloudy evenings, when night falls in dim and icy veils, the sky awash with a rolling, tainted black.

He wakes covered in cold sweats. The bedside alarm reads 3:58 AM. His nightmares are always blue lately, but the tail end is a fiery red, punctuated by the sizzling sound of a burning corpse. It’s been burning for months.

The couch in the common area is not empty. He flops down next to its sole occupant, grateful for her presence but a bit sad too. No one deserves to be awake alone in the long hours before dawn breaks.

Bobbi pushes a half-finished mug in front of him. “Here, drink this,” she offers. Black tea with too much milk and too much sugar. Just the way he likes it. He wonders if she made it for him, if she’s been waiting for him this whole time.

“Don’t flatter yourself,” she laughs, a response to his quizzical expression. “My knee and the cold don’t get along. I couldn’t sleep. Figured you couldn’t too.”

“How long have you been up?”

She simply shrugs. He nods, a mutual understanding for the intricacy of silences, and hands her back the tea. They pass it back and forth until there’s barely anything left, the residue leaving a lonely smudge at the bottom. Then he turns on the Xbox and they content themselves with some mindless FIFA matches.

(All the first-person shooter games have been thrown away. No one ever questions why.)

When they head back to the living quarters, the sun is just starting to rise. Sleepy light drifts in through the window as they walk pass, slanting on her face in bars of gold. There’s this unbidden fondness for her that overwhelms him, and he bumps her shoulder to whisper a soft thank you. She answers by nodding toward the sunrise. A clean slate. February is meant for restless sleepers who are trying to forgive themselves.

“Good morning, Fitz,” she says.

Neither of them knows that it’s the last private moment they have together.

 

vi.

After Russia, he stops doing shots. It’s not a conscious choice, not really. In Bucharest, he gets a tequila shot and just picks at the lime for a while, the dull ache like a phantom limb that he knows is there but can’t quite touch. Then he gives up and orders one of those garish florescent cocktails instead.

In the afterglow of it all, tangled between the sheets, he listens as Jemma tells him about an undead monster who looks like Grant Ward who acts like Will. “It’s awful, Fitz,” she concludes in a hushed tone, her shuddering breath ghosting his skin. “I’m just glad at least Bobbi and Hunter are not caught up in this mess.”

He hums in agreement.

“Do you think they’re doing okay?” she asks, the sheets slipping off her shoulders as she sits up to meet his gaze. She’s holding her immense heart in her hands like a little bird, and _god_ , maybe the universe is forever expanding and maybe we’re all dying as we live, but she’s the only one who makes it less devastating.

Overwhelmed, he surges up to kiss her. They’re both smiling, he can feel it against his lips, contentment unfurling in a haze. When they pull apart, he answers in earnest, “I don’t know, Jemma, but I hope they’re happy too.”

 

vii.

Eventually, they all carry on living. He does shots again and they re-stock the fridge with Bendeery. It’s not a form of forgetting; they just learn to re-shape their lives around the dull ache, which is only noticeable when they choose to remember.

This evening, however, he’s acutely aware of the ache in the empty.

After Radcliffe, he and Jemma decide to leave for a while. Just make a run for it, like if they’re fast enough maybe they can leave the hurt behind. In the blur of it all, the headwind stinging their eyes, they find themselves with an overnight layover in Changi. Except for a bored cashier in a 7-Eleven down the walkway, they’re alone in the terminal.

Jemma’s dozing off, a backpack wedged between her head and the floor, but he can’t sleep, so he decides to wander for a while. It’s strange, this dreamlike atmosphere of an airport after midnight. He feels suspended between places, out of sorts. Usually he appreciates the chance to slip into a state of not-being, clear his mind and all that, but now the liminality just makes him sad. He likes belonging. He likes it when their team felt like home.

He goes to 7-Eleven for a bag of chips. Outside, night falls more heavily on the tarmac, a vague yet persistent melancholy. He takes his time in the aisles just to keep the cashier company. That way, the loneliness is easier to bear. They don’t make small talk over the counter, choosing to share a smile instead, but when he reaches for his wallet, he hears a voice behind him.

“On me,” it says, languid and syrupy and _gold_. “I still owe you a shot.”

 

viii.

It’s Bobbi, of course. He shouldn’t be that surprised. Here, in a country not even visible on the maps, where sharp skyscrapers are built upon mottled history, people are bound to run into the ones they lost.

They sit by a giant glass panel that overlooks a vacant taxiway. It has begun to drizzle, and raindrops trap the terminal light within as they trickle down the glass like liquid diamonds.

Bobbi sneaks the occasion chip from him as she tells him stories. There’s that time she and Hunter hitch-hiked across The Great Plains to shake a tail and ended up in Mexico with no passports, that time they accidentally joined a cult in exchange for protection, and that time Hunter got into a bar fight with an Irish gang so she had to drag him away kicking and screaming. “Jemma would have loved to see that,” she remarks before snatching the last chip with a grin, and it swells and swells until it fills up the empty airport.

He wants to tell her stories too, Stories-with-a-capital-S, the kinds that don’t include ancient monsters or dead friends or killer robots, but he can’t, so he holds his tongue.

They watch the rain in silence. He glances at her from time to time, and is struck by how far away she looks against the backdrop of sultry tropical rain, spilling over the foreign skyline that’s stirring at the tail-end of its dream.

After a while, she nudges him gently. “Hey,” she says. “What are you thinking?”

_You, actually_ , he thinks. _You hogging the Xbox. You making dreadful tea. You steadying me when my hands are not steady. You dying on a hospital bed and you hobbling around the lab learning to walk again, battle-scarred and heavy, heavy hearted. You believing in me believing in you. When I think of you I think of broken and persistent light, and it makes me want to scream to silence the absence of you between my ribs. It’s not the same without you. This team doesn’t feel like home because the roof caved in after you left. Lay down your load, take your heart home. Goddamn it, just take it home._

He inhales sharply. “Nothing.” He shrugs. “I was just wondering if you are happy.”

Past the jut of her shoulder, he catches a glimpse of a few bleary-eyed passengers shuffling into the terminal to catch an early flight. Down the walkway two duty-free clerks fumble with their keys to unlock the store. Just like that, the liminal inertia is gone, and slowly but surely everything moves forward again.

“Yeah,” she answers after a beat. “In a way, yeah, I am.”

 


End file.
